Property rights and domestication

This paper combines the property rights approach of Barzel with models from renewable resource and evolutionary economics to examine the domestication of wild animals. Wild animals are governed by weak property rights to stocks and individuals while domesticated animals are governed by private owner...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of institutional economics Vol. 16; no. 2; pp. 199 - 215
Main Authors: Lueck, Dean, Torrens, Gustavo
Format: Journal Article
Language:English
Published: Cambridge Cambridge University Press 01.04.2020
Subjects:
Animals
Archaeology
Cattle
Deoxyribonucleic acid
DNA
Domestication
Economic theory
Economics
Methods
Morphology
Property rights
Middle East
Asia
ISSN:1744-1374, 1744-1382
Online Access:Get full text
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Summary:This paper combines the property rights approach of Barzel with models from renewable resource and evolutionary economics to examine the domestication of wild animals. Wild animals are governed by weak property rights to stocks and individuals while domesticated animals are governed by private ownership of stocks and individuals. The complex evolutionary process of domestication can be viewed as a conversion of wild populations into private property, as well as a transition from natural selection to economic selection controlled by owners of populations and individuals. In our framework domestication is not the explicit goal of any economic agent, but it emerges as a long-run outcome of an innovation in hunting strategies in a hunter–gatherer society. Our formal model also suggests that the domestication process moves slowly at first but then proceeds rapidly, and is aligned with the archeological evidence on domestication events.
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ISSN:1744-1374
1744-1382
DOI:10.1017/S1744137419000390